MNT ERA-Net opened 2007 with the launch of its second coordinated call

Following the success of its first widely coordinated call, on 1 January 2007 the MNT ERA-Net project announced the launch of the the 2007 call for proposals in the field of Micro and Nano technologies. The current call involves 19 funding programmes of 15 EU Member States. The first such call launched exactly one year ago demonstrated strong interest in such research cooperation with 42 full proposals, involving 233 partners from 17 European countries. The projects under this form of transnational cooperation are less complex and more market oriented that those of the EU Framework programme, and as such reportedly offer the added benefit of accelerated, coherent national funding decisions.

Similar to the previous call, transnational consortia are invited to submit applied R&D project proposals including partners from at least two of the Member States / Regions involved in the initiative. The proposal submission process involves two phases: a pre-proposal phase (with deadline on 15 March 2007) and a full proposal phase (with deadline on 22 May 2007). The submission procedure relies on well-established rules and processes normally applied by national/regional funding agencies and already familiar to proposers. Taking into account the national/regional evaluations, the MNT ERA-Net Transnational Coordination Team ranks proposals, with final decisions to made at the national/regional funding agencies. The transnational projects are expected to start by September 2007.

About the MNT ERA-Net project:
The MNT ERA-Net project was launched in January 2004. It is supported through the FP6-Coordination programme. MNT ERA-Net will coordinate the currently fragmented research programmes and exchange good practice on aspects of programme design and management. The biggest impact is expected to come from promoting co-operation between national programmes. This could involve avoidance of duplicated effort and discouragement for spending on small programmes where co-operation at European level would be more cost-effective. The ERA-NET may have an additional role to play in the development of industrial standards for MNT – especially of the design of interfaces between micro-components.

Further information about MNT ERA-Net:
http://www.mnt-era.net/